My Life As A Fake_ A Novel Part 2

48

The minute my telegram had been delivered to Jalan Campbell both Tina and Mrs Lim were up and down the road. The hantu hantu is coming. The is coming. The hantu hantu is coming. You have seen them together, Mem, so you can imagine the prance, the rage. Soon all the morons in the street were in a state about the ghost. is coming. You have seen them together, Mem, so you can imagine the prance, the rage. Soon all the morons in the street were in a state about the ghost. Cheh! Cheh! Peering out like aunties from behind their blinds. Peering out like aunties from behind their blinds.The drug for Graves' disease was propylthiouracil- which Chubb duly spelt out for me. Got it through customs, he said, without an eye being raised. Pa.s.sport stamped. Free to go. Everything was first-rate until the taxi pulled up outside the shophouse and I jammed the b.l.o.o.d.y box inside its sliding door. Wah! Wah! Suddenly great clouds of carbon dioxide all around me-not a man but a walking factory, a brewery. A dramatic entrance, Mem, but very tame compared to what the neighbours claimed to see. A creature with no body. Entrails flashing blue. Suddenly great clouds of carbon dioxide all around me-not a man but a walking factory, a brewery. A dramatic entrance, Mem, but very tame compared to what the neighbours claimed to see. A creature with no body. Entrails flashing blue.I stepped inside and was greeted by my child. Five foot six at least and almost prettier than her mother. But she had those two tiny freckles on her upper lip and was alight with foolish love for the creature. Luminous, she stung me.Of course she was frightened and not only of the steaming box. She thought I was the devil. I asked, Where is the patient?Atas. So saying she set off up the stairs, her bare feet whispering against the polished teak. Is that not a sound a man will remember all his life-a woman's feet brushing across a wooden floor?I followed with my dry ice billowing in the dark. There were lamps upstairs, no electricity. The room was not like now, Mem. It was ruled by the living creature in his giant teak bed. I beheld the wretch-the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes- wah! what wah! what eyes-were fixed on me. In the lamplight he was a grub in its coc.o.o.n, swathed in mosquito net. All around me, on the floor, stacked against the walls, were the journals his slaves had made for him. eyes-were fixed on me. In the lamplight he was a grub in its coc.o.o.n, swathed in mosquito net. All around me, on the floor, stacked against the walls, were the journals his slaves had made for him.He lay in the darkness like a raja. Beside him I could make out his little Chinese soldier. You've seen her. Hard to look at all those scars-lah scars-lah. Her flat face shivered when she saw me, but I was her master's maker and she pulled back the mosquito net.Tuan Bob, she announced.And there he lay, the thing that I had brought to life, the brutish genius, glistening in the dark. His sweaty eyelids had retracted and the eyes were bulging from his shining face. He had become disgusting-gaunt, emaciated, the ribs nearly breaking through his wet and slippery skin. The old doctor in Randwick had prepared me for the jerky and spasmodic movements of the eyes, but not for the power of this disease to topple such a giant.Seeing me, the tyrant made a choked-off phlegmy noise, presumably a laugh. What was the joke? That I had needed him? That he was my life? Yet the more d.a.m.n vile he was, the better it suited me. 'Lo though I were despised and spat upon.' For now my daughter would finally see what sort of man I was.I asked the name of his doctor so I could deliver him the drug.No doctor, he said. It is the disease you invented for me. It has always been here waiting. Cure it if you can.By this stage I did not doubt I had invented his disease. I set to work, Mem, straight away. Must unmake my joke, you see. There was a large bowl of soapy water on the floor and much of it was spilled. I placed my box where it was dry, and unpacked the bottle and pipette. The propylthiouracil was a tincture. My daughter brought the water so I might dilute it and, though frightened, she met my gaze. I could look directly through the iris and see her courage, as I named it. Silently she pleaded that I would not hurt him, and with more tenderness than she had shown when I was tripped and kicked into the mud.I prepared the medicine and poured it into a little china cup as the females attempted to sit my genius up. They Bapa'd Bapa'd and and Tuan'd Tuan'd and whispered in his ear but could not budge him. Finally he made it clear that I was the one he designated to touch his skin, to slip my hand beneath his sweating back and raise him so he might sip his tincture like a d.a.m.ned lover in my arms, a dying Jesus in a Roman church. and whispered in his ear but could not budge him. Finally he made it clear that I was the one he designated to touch his skin, to slip my hand beneath his sweating back and raise him so he might sip his tincture like a d.a.m.ned lover in my arms, a dying Jesus in a Roman church.There was a strange metallic odour like copper about his skin. And his breath, Mem, dust and garlic. But what I felt most was his animus against me, the tremor of his hatred even as I ministered to him.No sooner was the drug ingested than he vomited, and all the putrid contents of his stomach flooded down his chest and across his hairy stomach and my daughter began to weep convulsively.You lift! Mrs Lim barked. Yes-Mem-no-Mem. I was her b.l.o.o.d.y coolie, so she thought. Lift now, she cried, and I carried her great Tuan Tuan and she was a little soldier beetle scurrying around the room, floating clean sheets into the air, fluffing pillows. and she was a little soldier beetle scurrying around the room, floating clean sheets into the air, fluffing pillows.Tina watched, sniffling. G.o.d knows what she thought.I held her bapa, all the while feeling his malevolent breath upon my cheek. To be so intimate with Bob McCorkle was disgusting, as unnatural and frightening as holding one's own vital organs in one's hands. His shaven head lolled back, and when I drew away he leered at me and sought my eyes. This behaviour I could put down to his disease. Nervousness, irritability, emotional lability, every symptom in the book. I held him for as long as it takes a two-gallon kettle to boil and only when his bath was ready could I be released.To nurse a beloved friend is one thing, Mem, but a tapeworm who has tortured you so long? My daughter knew this. She must have known. I had made myself his nurse, his servant, his doctor. This was how the weeks pa.s.sed for me. I slept on the hard floor beside him. I had no desire to lessen my pain.Neither of the women would speak to me. They brought me soup and noodles but I always ate alone, squatting beside the great dark bed, one of them was always watching over me.I was so confident about the treatment, said Chubb, so certain of the cure, so slow to notice that my patient now weighed even less. His mind was wandering also. And his eyes-wah! Jellyfish about to burst. The weaker he grew, the more polite he became. Twice he smiled. From time to time he thanked me. He was dying. He knew that well before I did, and he was fretting, you see, about the woman and the child. What he needed now he could not steal or extract with violent threats against my person. He wanted me to promise to care for his dependents, and to do that he must charm me or make me pity him. Jellyfish about to burst. The weaker he grew, the more polite he became. Twice he smiled. From time to time he thanked me. He was dying. He knew that well before I did, and he was fretting, you see, about the woman and the child. What he needed now he could not steal or extract with violent threats against my person. He wanted me to promise to care for his dependents, and to do that he must charm me or make me pity him.As my wishes were almost exactly the same as his, you might think I would immediately put his mind to rest? But by now I had known him for fifteen years and had lost my life because of him. I had good reason to be wary of his cunning. So while my heart could not help but be torn by his agony I did not dare let myself soften.Tell me yes, he cried, or tell me no.But I would do neither, and finally he could bear my recalcitrance no more and had a kind of seizure, thrashing and twisting on the bed as if he could rip himself apart. He roared. His huge eyes were terrible to see. It seemed the skull could not contain them long. He fell from the bed and cracked his head against the floor. Even this I withstood, but his upset escalated and as it caused such distress to the women I finally allowed myself to offer the thing I craved the most.I gave him my word that I would care for my daughter, the other one as well.Hearing this, he collapsed back on his pillow. Everything in his hard, handsome face was sunken, everything except the eyes. Wah! Wah! So big now I could see my upside-down reflection when I spoke to him. So big now I could see my upside-down reflection when I spoke to him.Come here, he said, patting the bed.What was there to be afraid of? He took my hand and his own was soft and feeble, boneless as a ghost's.I am easy now, he said. We are one, you and I.It was a lovely morning in the dry season, Mem. Now their patient had grown so calm, they left on separate errands, Mrs Lim for Chow Kit, Tina to fetch a bowl of hot tow too fah tow too fah, which was all the creature could hold down.We were alone. The early sun was streaming through the windows and the mynah birds were in the mulberry tree out the back. In the street a cracked voice called for people to bring out their old newspapers-paper lama, paper lama.What a s.h.i.tty thing it is, Christopher, to come to this.I said death comes to all of us.No, no. I labour all my b.l.o.o.d.y life to make a work of art. And now the end is here, there is only you to give it to. My old enemy.He twisted away and when he turned back I saw the volume which you held last night. Not the least idea of what it was. It felt as feverish and slippery as his skin.What is this?Swear you won't destroy it, he said.There on the t.i.tle page I read that fierce sarcastic t.i.tle, My Life as a Fake My Life as a Fake.Swear you will not burn it.What is it?The human soul, he said.I thought he mocked himself. What did I expect? Certainly not art.I swear, I told him, that I shall not damage this in any way.I was being truthful. I would have protected it even if it was the ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic, which is exactly what I thought it was.Give me, he said. You can read it when I'm gone. He was, finally, very gentle, touching my face so affectionately he might have been a doting uncle. Good man, he said. I know you will look after it.I had thought his hatred of me all gone, but recently I have come to wonder if, even when he seemed so gentle, he was secretly relishing the notion of making me a bicycle mechanic. So like him. To trick me into living my own lie-ah? Lock myself in a pit of oil and gasoline. Did he wish his fate to be mine? If so, he hid his feelings until my daughter returned with the tow too fah tow too fah.He did not die until the following day but his demise, unlike his life, was peaceful, and he held the book against his chest until the very end.

49

You have seen it coming. I was treating the wrong disease, and he died not of Graves' disease but of a rare leukemia, myeloproliferative disorder. The leucocytes had acc.u.mulated near the eyes, which is what turned them into jellyfish. He died of cancer.The coroner was an Indian chap. Furious with me. I had impersonated a doctor. Smuggled drugs. I should be hanged, he said, except he could not see how that would benefit the family.Leukemia was recorded on his death certificate but this had no meaning to the woman and the girl, who were soon telling the neighbours that the hantu hantu had sucked the blood from Mr Bob. had sucked the blood from Mr Bob.It is hard to believe the monster had been so loved, Mem, but they wept for him on Jalan Campbell. They had seen the way he cooed and fawned around the little girl. They would never understand how he had fed off her, stolen her very life to fertilise his ego. It was not only Tina he devoured. Every child in that street was fuel for his forge. He was a user and a thief, yet tears were shed for him. My role was to be his cause of death.But I had won as well, so I thought. I had my daughter. She did not love me then but I did not doubt that she would learn. And while she spurned me, my life was not a desert. I was sustained by his strange and fearsome book. My Life as a Fake My Life as a Fake. What an accusation! It was to me it spoke, and had been willed to me directly, but I knew the women would not like me touching it. So I read it in secret, taking little trips up the stairs when I was at home alone. I was at it like a hidden arak bottle, going back for more of the harsh, bitter taste. Satu lagi Satu lagi. Just one more sip.Certainly, Mem, I was as cunning as a drunk and it was several months before they caught me at my studies. Wah! Wah! You never saw such rage. They scratched my hands with their fingernails but that was nothing. I must put the volume down at once. The little scarface threatened what would happen if I erred again: sharp knife in the night. You never saw such rage. They scratched my hands with their fingernails but that was nothing. I must put the volume down at once. The little scarface threatened what would happen if I erred again: sharp knife in the night.My daughter smirked.After this time, my heart hardened against her.She had been used and abused and it had made her cruel and ignorant. I should have felt great pity but suddenly I loathed her. As you loathe someone who has betrayed you, cheated, lied, used you like a toy, made profit from everything that is good in you. This was not her fault, but that did not stop me hating her.In spite of this, you have seen, I continued to serve the creature's interests, for even if I could have abandoned the family I would never leave that work of art alone and unprotected.I was patient, Mem, and I waited, because I knew one day you would come, or someone like you. Such a bet to place-lah! What chance you would find me reading Rilke? My life was almost a waste, but now, Mem, I will fetch you the book. What chance you would find me reading Rilke? My life was almost a waste, but now, Mem, I will fetch you the book.He stood. He was quite shaky, I thought. I'll come with you, I said.No, no, you must not. At seven o'clock they will go together to the railway station. There are bicycle parts coming from Singapore. I must be there to mind the shop.Very well, I said. So you will be back here by seven?By seven-fifteen-he smiled-you will have the book.I was distracted, I think, at that moment. Signing the bill. I did not pay particular attention to his departure.

50

Chubb left me with the dreadful problem of how to endure the three hours between now and his return. I packed and repacked my case-toothbrush, unwashed clothes, the free postcard of the ghastly Merlin. I ate the horrible hotel biscuit whose charms I had so far resisted and drank a gla.s.s of musty water. Then what? I was stuck ages away from the moment when I would finally hold that rough and slippery volume in my hands. From there it was another eternity until Charlotte Street, where I might feast contentedly on my treasure, its foreign stippled skin bathed in watery London light. In that far-off happy time I would copy every line by hand, not merely for safety-though that too was much on my agitated mind-but to learn it inside out. This is how I'd first read Milton, aged fifteen, and perceived what my dull lesbian headmistress would never see: that it was Satan for whom the poet felt sympathy. Back in London I would use my pencil as an instrument of worship, using it to plumb the logic of McCorkle's ripped and rumpled map.But how the time did drag in that dreary hotel room. And when night fell a full seventy-five minutes remained and I was irrationally frightened that the wet octopus of Kuala Lumpur would manage to suck my book into its fishy maw.Downstairs, I sought the bar. No members present, as they say. I was reduced to ordering a curried-egg sandwich and a Tiger beer, and as the first wash of bubbles touched my throat Slater sat down opposite me. His brow was stern, shadowed, like deeply eroded rock.Don't, he ordered.I thought he was forbidding me the beer, which would have been out of character, to say the least.Keep away from those women, he said, whatever you do.You know, John, that's exactly what I was going to say to you. The young one particularly.Micks, please. Get off it.Oh, you weren't seducing her?He ignored that. What are you hatching? he said. I have been sitting over there watching you. You are in a complete b.l.o.o.d.y state, so please do tell me what you're up to because I don't think you understand exactly where you are.Don't be ridiculous.Have you sent mad old Chubby off to steal that book again? Yes? I'm right?I would have denied it but had no defence against his angry eyes.You must call him off, he said. Those women are the dogs of h.e.l.l.Yes, but as it happens the dogs are at the railway station.They're on to you, Micks, believe me. You'll never see that ma.n.u.script.You know that?I said they're they're on to you. on to you.How could he know? It was impossible. Yet he succeeded in making me believe that my treasure was about to be s.n.a.t.c.hed away and I simply could not bear it. I stood and rushed out into the hot night. The bill, I imagined, would detain him for a moment, but as my cab pulled out of the congested drive I saw him entering the one behind, and now I supposed we would be like creatures in a bad movie. In order to confuse my pursuer I directed the driver to the Coliseum, which I recalled was a short walk from the shophouse, and there I jumped out and dashed into the throng. a.s.suming Slater was behind me in the traffic, I crossed the street and soon was in a very questionable lane. In the adjacent alleyways, illuminated by their own flashlights, were women in short dresses whom I knew to be men. Someone called out to me and I splashed off through the puddles. I emerged onto Batu Road disorientated, and although I pushed rather violently through the crowd I was not confident of my direction.How relieved I was to see the familiar police station and then, diagonally across Jalan Campbell, the bicycle shop, its roller door wide open, the clear white light spilling out into the smoky night. There was no-one inside! That surely meant that the women were at the station, just as Chubb had said. I threaded my way through the tangled bicycles, calling out h.e.l.lo as I ascended the stairs. I heard a thump. Chubb, I thought.Upstairs there was sufficient light to reveal Mrs Lim lying on the floor with Tina kneeling at her side. The girl turned towards me and in the glow from the window I could see that her luscious top lip was split open like a burst sausage, blood washing her teeth, black as betel.I don't know what I said but I certainly believed, even before understanding what had happened, that I was to blame.Mrs Lim tried to sit up, then groaned and fell back to the floor. She too had been cut and her blouse was dark with blood. The floor around them was shining, black and wet.What had Chubb done? What horror was I responsible for? I got no answer. They stared up at me as if at the enemy eyes narrowed.I asked again and cannot remember how I put it, but the girl's answer was in the rough Australian accent she had inherited from McCorkle: The mongrel-lah. He ran away.It was Mr Chubb who did this to you?Mrs Lim gasped and pointed towards the window.But the window was barred. No-one could have escaped through it.She continued pointing and then I saw, beneath the sill, what I took to be a pile of abandoned boots and clothes.They kill him, Mrs Lim said. We could not stop them. They try to kill us too.I cannot describe the confusion of my mind as it attempted to explain what my eyes were seeing. The last thing my brain would tell me was the truth. From the lane outside came an old man's voice-'paper lama, paper lama'-and I walked to the window. On the floor below was the pile of clothes. The light was slightly blue, making Chubb's shoes appear almost purple. There was something else: I imagined it was a dog. I don't know what I thought exactly, but I know I reached down and felt meat, as raw as in a Chow Kit butcher's shop. Then I saw the soft burr of that beautifully shaped monk's head, and I knew at last what it must be. Sparagmos Sparagmos. This was the horror at the poem's end. The man I had spent the afternoon with was now dismembered, his warm blood on my hands and spreading like honey across the floor.Suddenly I was kneeling and then Slater was there, his big hands underneath my arms, pulling me to my feet.Come, he said, we must go.I decided he was afraid that the attacker would return. As he pulled me towards the stairs I insisted that the women come with us. When they would not budge I thought they wished to bravely guard the book.Come, I said, bring the book with you.Book gone, said Mrs Lim. Stole the book.On her hard, square face was a sheen of satisfaction I could not understand.Come, said Slater. Micks, darling, you must not stay.The Chinese woman's face was so strange. By now it was clear, even to me, that she did not wish me well.Micks, do as I say. Come now.Confused as a drunk who dimly understands she has given offence, I permitted him to escort me down the stairs and out into Jalan Campbell and across to the police station, so conveniently close.We were treated with the utmost seriousness and taken immediately to a kind of conference room. Then I was shown to a separate, smaller office. I was given a towel and bowl and only then did I fully appreciate that my hands and arms were bright with blood. As I washed I brooded that the women were alone and unprotected. I recall very little, only that I was extremely cold and they gave me a blanket and took my statement. No-one removed the bowl. Whenever the door opened or closed, the surface of the red liquid shook. It was Chubb, his substance, the blood that had coursed through his beating heart.When they told me I could go, John Slater was waiting by the door. He gave the policemen back their blanket and wrapped his jacket round my shoulders. Everything I had hoped for was lost, gone, dead.Back at the Merlin, a wedding party was spilling into the foyer. I badly wanted a drink but Slater bundled me into the lift. There were three men in the car with us-j.a.panese, I think.Slater got me inside his room which, unlike mine, turned out to be very well provisioned. He poured me a large single-malt but not even its distinctive peaty flavour could mask the taste of blood.Slater sat on the bed opposite me. Micks, darling, he said quietly, do you understand what has happened?Poor Christopher is dead. The book is stolen.You understand the women are lying?No, I saw him. He's dead.Yes, but didn't you see the mad triumph on their faces?They were in shock, I said. They'd been attacked.They're lying, darling. About b.l.o.o.d.y everything. Didn't you see the book? It was sitting on the shelf where it always is.He fetched a big tub of cold cream and a box of tissues and, without asking permission, began to clean my face. I had no idea of my condition, blood all across my cheeks and ears. G.o.d knows what I had done.You have cold cream, John?Shush.He cleaned my neck and arms, and then took a cotton bud to my blood-lined nails. It had taken me years to realise that, for all his faults, John Slater was truly very kind.I was sure you were going to notice the book, he said. You're a lucky girl not to have.How am I possibly lucky?Darling, don't you understand yet? They killed him.Then who attacked them?They did it to themselves.I did howl then, most horribly, and the dear man held me and did everything he could to give me comfort.Though I thought I now understood exactly what had happened, it would take me an awfully long time to accept the full extent of the horror that had occurred in the shrine on Jalan Campbell, and even back in London I could not grasp it firmly, not least because I had no sensible explanation of McCorkle himself.The result, of course, was that I was left with a wound that would not heal no matter how I tended it, and tend it I did, obsessively, until even Annabelle was forced to tell me I had become a bore. I expelled her for her honesty. I did not care. I was now above such sc.r.a.pes and hurts for I had turned into one of those 'sad friends of Truth Milton describes in his Areopagitica: Areopagitica: 'such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangl'd body of Osiris.' The body of truth, he meant, dismembered and scattered-in Greek, 'such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangl'd body of Osiris.' The body of truth, he meant, dismembered and scattered-in Greek, sparagmos sparagmos.I now commenced to travel compulsively 'up and down gathering up limb by limb' of that horrid puzzle. It was this quest that sent me journeying out to Australia at a time when I could scarcely afford the bus fare to Old Church Street, and at the end of all this ridiculous expense and anguish the only 'fact' I could be certain of was that McCorkle had a physical existence and it was separate from Chubb's.This I would not accept and so I laboured madly on, stubborn as a goat, writing pestering letters, borrowing money, imperilling The Modern Review The Modern Review, getting sucked deeper and deeper into the mora.s.s until, one dark winter's afternoon on Oxford Street, I suffered what is politely called a nervous breakdown.It was certainly not John Slater's idea that I should return to K.L., but when this was deemed important for my convalescence he behaved like the dear friend he had become, and this time he did not slip away to Kuala Kangsar. No-one, certainly not the genius doctors at the Tavistock Clinic, had ever considered the possibility that the two murderers might be exactly where I had seen them last and that the sight of them would not be therapeutic in the least. By 1985 Jalan Campbell's name had been changed to Jalan Dang w.a.n.gi, but the bicycle business was just as it had looked thirteen years before and the old black vise still sat where Chubb had left it, on the floor inside the door. Seeing that ugly device did rather wrench my heart and I would have paid any price to have the dear old puritan alive, with his wry sweet smile and his sniffy sn.o.bbery, his desperation to tell the story of his sad, unlikely life.One can a.s.sume that McCorkle's ma.n.u.script remained in the shrine upstairs, although by then it seemed as foul to me as the disgusting giant orchid with which Mrs Lim had first attracted the poet's attention.Tina was by now in her thirties, and if she did not appear to recognise the tourists at the door, the scars made her perfectly identifiable to us. We remained there only a moment, until the Chinese woman looked up from her abacus. John doffed his hat and she, for her part, raised her upper lip to display the lethal edges of her small white crooked teeth.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Australian readers will have noted certain connections between Bob McCorkle and Ern Malley. Indeed, McCorkle's early verse is lifted word for word from Malley's 'The Darkening Ecliptic,' first published in the literary magazine Angry Penguins Angry Penguins in 1944. in 1944.

Of course, Malley's poetry and biography const.i.tuted a hoax conceived by two talented anti-modernists, Harold Stewart and James McAuley These conservatives wrote not only the verse I have borrowed for Bob McCorkle but also the wonderful letters they attributed to Malley's equally fict.i.tious sister, which fabrications also appear in My Life as a Fake My Life as a Fake, though in much-abbreviated form.

The editor of Angry Penguins Angry Penguins, Max Harris, having already been humiliated, was then called into court on the same charges faced by my fictional David Weiss, and I have drawn from transcripts of his bizarre trial.

'I still believe in Ern Malley' Harris wrote years later.

'I don't mean that as a piece of smart talk. I mean it quite simply. I know that Ern Malley was not a real person, but a personality invented in order to hoax me. I was offered not only the poems of this mythical Ern Malley, but also his life, his ideas, his love, his disease, and his death.... Most of you probably didn't think about the story of Ern Malley's life. It got lost in the explosive revelation of the hoax. In the holocaust of argument and policemen, meaning versus nonsense, it was not likely you closed your eyes and tried to conjure up such a person as the mythical Ern Malley ... a garage mechanic suffering from the onset of Grave's Disease, with a solitary postcard of Durer's 'Innsbruck' on his bedroom wall. Of someone knowing he is going to die young, in a world of war and death, and seeing the streets and the children with the eyes of the already dead.

'A pretty fancy. It can have no meaning for you. But I believed in Ern Malley. In all simplicity and faith I believed such a person existed, and I believed it for many months before the newspapers threw their banner headline at me. For me Ern Malley embodies the true sorrow and pathos of our time. One had felt that somewhere in the streets of every city was an Ern Malley ... a living person, alone, outside literary cliques, outside print, dying, outside humanity but of it....

'As I imagined him Ern Malley had something of the soft staring brilliance of Franz Kafka; something of Rilke's anguished solitude; something of Wilfred Owen's angry fatalism. And I believe he really walked down Princess Street somewhere in Melbourne....

'I can still close my eyes and conjure up such a person in our streets. A young person. A person without the protection of the world that comes from living in it. A man outside.'

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Four of those I wish to thank are poets whose names are not unfamiliar, while another, Sir Frank Swettenham, was a colonial administrator now of dubious repute. During the three years it took to write this novel I have been touched by the generosity of family and friends, and those so close it is often hard to tell the difference-Maria Aitken, Carol Davidson, Peter Best, Gary Fisketjon, Michael Heyward, Paul Kane, Alec Marsh, Patrick McGrath, Lucy Neave, Sharon Olds, Robert Polito, Jon Riley, Deborah Rogers, Mona Simpson, Alison Summers, Betsy Sussler, and Binky Urban. Two gifted Malaysian writers, Rehman Rashid and Kee Thuan Chye, were selfless in the a.s.sistance they offered one who had come to them as a stranger. If this book contains errors of locution or history, the fault is mine, the stranger's. Another Malaysian writer, Dr. M. Shanmughalingam, not only offered advice and friendship but also allowed me to read his unfinished autobiography, which proved invaluable to my understanding of the Tamils who are such an important part of Malay society. In Kuala Lumpur, Victor Chin provided me with an intense tutorial in shophouse culture. Khoo Salma Nasution, the author of Streets of George Town, Penang of Streets of George Town, Penang, was a powerhouse; on my third visit to that almost perfect island, she found me an entire lifetime's worth of places and memories which have made their way, sometimes coded, mostly trans.m.u.ted, into this narrative. Lastly I must thank John Dauth, the former Australian High Commissioner in Malaysia, whom I am now pleased to call a friend; and also Simon Merrifield, presently counselor at that same High Commission, who organized that memorable dinner when, straight off the flight from New York City, I met with so many of Malaysia's great minds and spirits. In a novel which contains its fair share of Ezra Pound, it is perhaps appropriate to conclude with the last lines of his translation of Rihaku's "Exile's Letter."What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking, There is no end of things in the heart.

I call in the boy, Have him sit on his knees here To seal this, And send it a thousand miles, thinking.